


Miyah

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: Harsh Realm, Lost
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-28
Updated: 2009-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 09:04:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two soldiers meet in a desert storm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Miyah

The first thing he feels is the pain. The next is the heat. The pain and the heat come together, and he groans and twists where he's lying, moving weakly, sand grinding against his cheek. He's starting to remember where this is, and just how far away from home he's come, and when he finally opens his eyes it's into a blaze of orange light. Fire. He sits up, the pain overwhelmed and numbed by shock, and he stares at the burning humvee. Through the flames and the twisted metal he can make out a human form in the passenger's seat, burning, burning.

"Fuck," he breathes and swipes a hand down his face, and it comes away bloody.

Overhead the sky is darkening into nightfall but he barely notices it. He must have been lying here unconscious for hours but he doesn't care. There had been five men in that vehicle and now there might only be one left, and since he seems to have been thrown clear somehow before the RPG hit--thrown or jumped--all he can do is sit and stare and wonder, dully, why he's alive when his friends are not.

Corbin. Corbin had had a new baby back home. Owens had been going to marry a girl. There's blood on his hands. He's not even sure it's his.

He looks to the side and there, sitting placidly on a small mound of sand, is a severed human head with the jaw torn away, the eye sockets black and empty and the thick brown hair charred. Owens. He turns away, leans over and vomits. Vomiting is bad, because this is the desert, he doesn't have his canteen, his only hope is to stay hydrated, but before this all happened Owens had been sitting next to him and telling the joke about the priest and the rabbi who went fishing together and now his head is sitting on a pile of sand. No other reaction really seems to make any kind of sense.

His leg is throbbing. He looks down, wiping his mouth, and there's a piece of shrapnel in it, in the thigh, just above the knee, the exposed metal about as long as his index finger and about as thick as his thumb. He reaches out and touches it, and bites back a whimper of pain.

It all comes back to pain in the end, seems like.

He's dragging himself back and away from the fire, reaching down for the radio at his belt, when there's a click and what he feels pressed into the back and top of his head can only be the muzzle of a gun. He stiffens, doesn't turn.

"Laa tataharrak."

_Shit._ His instinct is to raise his hands but he doesn't. His Arabic is shaky but it's not that shaky, and he knows what he's just been told. He sits perfectly still, and he feels the muzzle move as the man holding it walks around beside him. He doesn't lift his head but he raises his eyes, and in the glow of the fire he sees a man of average height, strongly built, and face weirdly calm, almost gentle. The olive green uniform belies that.

"Amrikani?"

He stares up, incredulous. "Na'am." _Yes._ Then, with a faint sneer, "Ghabee." Because it's a stupid question, and he's not sure why he'd bothered to learn the Arabic for stupid, but now he's glad he did. He's less glad when the butt of the assault rifle hits him in the jaw and he half falls back, wincing.

"Look at my fucking uniform! What the fuck else—You were fucking _shooting_ at us."

The butt of the gun jabs at him again and he wants to smack it aside, but he doesn't. He doesn't want to die out here. Not after having come so close already.

"And you were shooting at us." He looks up again, sharply, because while it's not exactly unheard of to run across someone out here with a decent command of English, it's still surprising. Especially with the corpses of his buddies burning a few yards away.

"I do not think you want to worry about blame right now. You killed my friends." The muzzle against his head again. "I should kill you."

"You killed _my_ friends." He laughs, and it turns into a harsh, rattling cough. Water. He's starting to feel the need for it and it's only going to get worse. "You wanna call us even?"

"No." The man shakes his head. "You are going to come with me."

"I'm--" He stares. "You're taking me prisoner?"

"You prefer I kill you? Your people are coming soon to look for you, I think. I do not want to be here when they arrive, and I think maybe a hostage is useful." He gestures with the gun. "Throw away your sidearm and get up. Up."

He does and he tries, because he's not sure what else to do with the gun pointed at him, but at the first flex of the muscle in his thigh a sharp white pain shoots up and into him like a dart and he yelps, his leg folding under him. The man with the gun—Republican Guard, no mistaking—mutters something in Arabic and grabs his shoulder roughly.

"Move. You move, or I will drag you by your hair."

He laughs weakly. "Nice, caveman." The support is rough and painful in itself but he manages to get his leg under him and stumbles forward, looking around at the empty waste that extends in all directions beyond the fire. Except off to the west, where he sees some low buildings. He remembers. The shooting had been coming from there. The man is half dragging, half shoving him towards them.

"You don't think... they'll look for you there?"

"My friends are there." The man's tone is tight, grim. "They are dead. There is no time to bury them properly. You will pay for them later." He nods sharply towards a low hill, a collection of rocks. "There is a well and a cave. Your people will not look there."

He coughs. A well. Water. Again he's thinking of it, and again he's aware of how thirsty he is, even with the sun no longer beating down on him. Fire, the heat of the desert, and he'd do almost anything for a drink of water.

That in itself is worrying.

"What if they do?"

The man shoots him a smile, still tight, still grim. "I will kill you."

The rest of the ground is covered in silence, except for his labored breathing and the dragging sound of his footsteps in the sand. The other man walks smoothly, silently and with a kind of catlike grace, as though he's used to the terrain, because he probably is. The last of the sun vanishes and the stars come out, and he would have expected darkness with no electric lights anywhere to be seen, but the light of the stars is the brightest he ever remembers seeing since his boots hit the tarmac that first day on a Saudi Arabian airstrip, and for a moment he stands, looking up, mouth agape, trying to take it all in.

He's shoved hard in the back, and when he looks down again the mouth of the cave is before him, low enough that he'll have to duck his head. From inside it he can hear the sound of trickling water, and he doesn't hesitate another second, stumbling and groping and scraping his hands against the rocks as he enters, and everything vanishes into darkness so black he can no longer tell if his eyes are even open. He fumbles forward in the dark, horribly conscious of the possibility of a deep pit opening in front of his feet, a drop he'll never see, a long fall and a slow death with his body broken and half submerged in chilly water. More of it than he can drink. More than he would ever want. Too much.

But he feels the hand on his shoulder again and for an instant he's grateful for it, and because he has no light he breaks through the darkness with his voice.

"Sh-ismak?"

A pause, and he wonders if the man will answer at all. Then, quietly, almost grudgingly,

"Sayid. Sayid Jarrah." Another pause. "Wa anta?"

"Mike Pinocchio." Because it's only fair. In the darkness, he can't see the deceptively gentle face or the olive green uniform. All that's real is the voice, the graceful shapes of the syllables, the hand warm and reassuring on his back, and it's easy to forget everything else and think about the water. The water. It's easy to believe that he'll be allowed as much as he wants. It's easy to believe all sorts of things.

Then the light returns and erases all of that.  


* * * 

  
It's a lantern, the light cold and white, and the small cavern that it illuminates is damp and chilly and littered with the evidence of previous occupation. A few old blankets. Some empty cans, and the black mark of a fire. Spent rounds. In the far wall and extending into the floor there's a small hole extending up to a crack in the wall, and a bucket standing at its lip with a rope snaking away from its handle. The well. Somewhere, still, dripping water, though Mike can't see the source. He stumbles once more against the wall, and Sayid shoves him forward again, growling something he doesn't catch. He trips over a loose rock and falls, palms scraping hard against the gravel on the floor, and when his leg hits the impact drives the shrapnel further in and he yells.

"What," Sayid says, voice rich with a strange blend of amusement and exasperation, and he hears him moving closer as he tries to push himself up with his raw and bleeding hands. "A little fall and it hurts you that much? Big strong American?" He digs the toe of his boot into Mike's side and pushes him over onto his back, and when there's a faint intake of breath Mike realizes that he hadn't seen the wound before.

Not that it's enough to make him forgive it.

Sayid sighs and steps back again, face shadowed in the lantern light. "I should have left you out there. You're no good to me dead."

"I'm not dead."

"With that kind of injury, you could be. It may turn septic and I have no medicine to treat you." He steps over to the bucket and Mike hears it clatter, and when he turns his head he sees Sayid crouching by the crack in the wall, his shadow tremendous and wavering against the walls, as he lowers the bucket down, and Mike hears the soft _sploosh_ as it hits the surface of the water, and his mouth instantly feels ten times drier.

He won't beg. He won't.

He's not entirely sure what happens next. The shadow of Sayid's body on the wall seems to expand, darkening the rest of the spaces between them both and finally blotting out his own vision, and the light doesn't return until the shocking cool of drops of wetness on his face drags it back, and he gasps.

"I already have so many good reasons to leave you outside for the birds," Sayid grunts, and Mike feels air hit his bare skin as his pant leg is cut away. "Do not give me any more of them."

It's a few seconds before he's moistened his lips enough to speak. "You leave me out there... you don't think they're gonna have one more reason to come in here, if they find me?"

No answer. But in the dimness and the quivering shadows, there's a curl to Sayid's lips that makes him wonder.

Then there's a tugging sensation, a feeling of give, and it's the cold white light of the lantern that expands and fills every space as Sayid tugs the shrapnel out of his leg and the pain momentarily overwhelms everything. He's not sure if he makes a sound. He can't hear anything. It leaves him trembling and gasping, like he's just come down from an orgasm, and there's a second wave of pain, the pain of water, of washing. He lifts his head and Sayid is cleaning the gash in his thigh with a scrap of his uniform, soaked and damp and now soaking with his blood. For the moment he's forgotten his own thirst, but that isn't the kind of blessing he would have hoped it would be.

"Why," he croaks when he can, "why don't you... leave me outside?" Not by the cave's mouth, not pointing the way. Out by the fire, by the pieces of his friends, out where he should be anyway. No one the wiser. The part of him that can still think at all is filled with the conviction that events should not be proceeding in this way.

Again no answer, and again that faint curl at the edges of Sayid's mouth, and again the hatred fades, along with the thirst, even the pain losing its edges, and he wonders.

Water dripping onto his cracked lips, and he parts them instinctively, and when the water hits his tongue he tastes blood, sweat, dirty cloth. It's sweet beyond anything he's ever tasted. He lifts his head, his mouth open blindly for it, but he's hurt, not helpless. He reaches up without thinking, grasps Sayid's wrist, and Sayid stiffens but doesn't pull away. He just wants that scrap of uniform to be closer to his mouth, the source of the sweetness. His lips brush the wet cloth and his mouth closes on it and he sucks the water out of it, groaning with the kind of desperate sensuality that only comes with the most intense and painful need.

Water and blood. _Sweet, sweet._ When he releases Sayid's wrist and the rag it's dipped into the bucket again and held back to his lips, and he sucks it dry. After, his tongue is raw from the friction of the cloth and his cheeks are sore from suction but his throat is wet. His insides feel as washed clean as the wound in his leg, and even that is only throbbing faintly. He stares up at Sayid, and Sayid stares back at him with dark and liquid eyes, and it seems to be all the communication that's necessary. He should hate this man but just for the moment he doesn't. He should run, but just for the moment he can't. He lets his eyes fall closed and all he hopes is that if he dreams, it won't be about Owens's head sitting there on the sand, jawless and eyeless and accusing. Waterless. Dry and barren and dead.

_Miyah,_ he thinks. And perhaps he says it aloud, because the last thing he sees before the shadows overtake him again is that curl of Sayid's lips, spreading and spreading in the wake of the darkness until only it and the darkness remain.  


* * * 

  
He has no way of knowing what time it is when he opens his eyes, for the light in the cave is the same dimness, even dimmer, because Sayid seems to have turned down the lantern. There's a brief moment of disorientation and then everything comes flooding back: his fireteam, then the shooting, the fire, the pain in his leg, which is considerably less than before. He shifts against the cool stone and tries to sit up but gradually it comes to him that his hands are tied in front of him, and his ankles as well. He shouldn't be surprised. What he should be surprised at is that it took this long.

He turns his gaze back towards the well and Sayid is sitting there against the wall, his rifle lying across his lap and his eyes open and dark and staring.

"Do you have to piss?"

Mike blinks once or twice. "I--" And then he feels the pressure in his bladder, probably lighter than it should be but there. "Yeah."

Sayid shifts forward on his knees, the rifle still in one hand, and bends over his ankles. "I am going to untie your feet. If you kick me it won't end well for you."

He could, he knows he could, try to land one square in his face and run for the cave entrance. And then what? Where? His radio is gone. His gun is gone. He has no water. Outside is only the merciless sun and miles and miles of sand. He could try to get the gun. And even if he does, the problem is still the same.

He holds his legs still while Sayid unties them, and he doesn't resist when he's pulled to his feet by the cloth binds around his wrists, though there's a flash of pain in his leg. He recognizes them as more scraps of his uniform. His leg is bare to halfway up the thigh, and he feels annoyingly lopsided.

Sayid is up again and nudging him with the rifle butt. "Move. We're going outside."

He moves, limping slightly and stepping into the dark passage, once again feeling off balance and half lost in the dark, and this time there's no hand at his back to orient himself by. But he stumbles forward, and finally there's light ahead of him. Faint light. Not daylight. He steps outside and again there's the vast expanse of the sky, the stars cold and still, and off to the east a faint red glow. If he didn't know better he might mistake it for fire, a fire bigger than any he's ever seen, but it's not that.

"Do it now," Sayid says shortly. "After the sun comes up you may not come out here again."

He shifts his boots in the sand, the air cool on his exposed leg, and gives Sayid a look that's mingled discomfort and sarcasm. "You gonna watch?"

"I will close my eyes," Sayid says dryly, and motions with the rifle. "Now."

"What about my hands?"

"They are tied in front of you. You can manage."

"Whatever," Mike grunts, and it isn't really that hard to get his fly down and his dick in his hand, pissing into the cool pre-dawn air.

When he's done and tucked back in Sayid steps forward and grabs his arm, and there's almost a bit of an accident in zipping up. He jerks in Sayid's grasp and curses, shooting him a glare. "Watch it."

Sayid ignores him, giving him another shove back towards the cave mouth, a dark crack in the rockface, foreboding even though he's been inside it already. "Move."

He's getting a little tired of the orders. He's used to taking orders—beyond used to it—but he's stranded in the desert with at least one of the bastards who shot a rocket right into the grill of his humvee, killed his fireteam, and the orders rankle. That's a kind word for what they do.

But Sayid has the gun, and for now, the water. He moves, back into the crack in the rock, back into the darkness, and he glances back just in time to see an angry red sun slip the first edge of itself over the line of the horizon.  


* * * 

  
"How is it that you know Arabic?"

Mike shifts his back against the rock wall. It's cool in here, anyway. The lantern is turned down further, down to the faintest glow, and in the low light all he can see is the dark glitter of Sayid's eyes. He sighs and considers not answering, but he's bored and exhausted and his leg is throbbing faintly, and he can't see any good reason not to. "I got a book. I figured we could be here a while." He smiles thinly. "I don't speak it that good. How the fuck do you know English?"

Sayid looks away, face lost in shadow, and for a moment there's just silence, and the steady trickle of the water. Then: "I aways wanted to go to America."

"Why?"

Even in the shadows, he sees a hint of that smile again. "Why does anyone want to go to America? I heard that it was something to see." He gestures with the rifle. "Your... your cities. Your... New York."

"I'm from New York." It's so strange to be talking like this, but maybe he's too tired to feel hatred right now. The fire and the scattered pieces of flesh feel like a dream. All that's real is the darkness and the water and the cool stone. "I mean... Queens. Some people would say that kinda doesn't count."

Sayid cocks his head slightly. "Why not?"

"It's..." Mike shrugs as best he can with his hands tied. "It's kind of a local thing. I dunno how to explain."

Sayid makes a quiet sound that may or may not be a laugh, and then for a time there's nothing. In the nothing, it's easier to think back. To remember. He doesn't hate, but when he closes his eyes he sees the fire, and he thinks about the letters he'll have to write. If he gets out of this alive. Owens and his girl back home. She has a ring on her finger. He'd showed them all a picture, told them how she cried when he gave it to her.

That's a life he's always known he'd never have. It's not fair that it should be taken away from someone else.

"Why did you shoot at us?" he asks, head leaned back against the wall and eyes closed, and he knows it's a stupid question, because it's a war and shooting is just what's done, but the words come out of him anyway and once they're out and hanging in the air he doesn't feel much inclination to call them back.

He can feel Sayid's stare even if he can't see it, and along with it he can feel the incredulity. "We did not—you shot at us first."

"We didn't even _see_ you." He opens his eyes and stares back, across what feels like an ocean of darkness. Outside, he knows, the sun is rising towards a hot noon. "What's it get you, bullshitting me now?"

"I am telling you the truth." Sayid's voice is low and cold. "We did not shoot."

"Whatever." He closes his eyes again, chest tight and hot and angry, and it comes to him that what bothers him far more than the act of the killing is the lying. And the senselessness of it. He would have hoped that here in the dark they could at least tell the truth.  


* * * 

  
He sleeps, and when he opens his eyes some time later, still half asleep, his leg is throbbing more strongly, as though something is beating against the inside of his skin, and Sayid is stripped to the waist and washing himself with a cloth and water from the well. Mike watches, eyes barely slits in the dimness, and the lantern light glistens on Sayid's wet skin, the strong set of his shoulders, the muscles moving in his sides and back. It's slow and dreamlike and he licks his lips and swallows, thirsty again. It's not just thirst. He knows himself well enough by now to know that it's lust, but it's just that he's so close to sleep, half dreaming right now, and he can't connect one thing with another, this man and the deaths of his friends. He watches, and water trickles down the angles of Sayid's shoulderblades, the skin rich and dark, and he wonders how that water would taste, and the skin it's running over.

And he sleeps again.  


* * * 

  
"I'm hungry." Still against the wall, still in the dimness, and he's not even sure how long it's been now. A day. Maybe a little over. His ankles are tied again and he shifts them uncomfortably, though the throbbing in his leg has faded again. If he really wanted to he could lean down and untie them, but he understands that the ties aren't meant to fully immobilize him. Just slow him down. Just to make any escape attempt more complicated.

Sayid sighs. "We had rations. I cannot go for them now."

"Why the fuck not?"

"Because." Sayid smiles thinly. "I cannot bring you with me, and if I leave you here, there is nothing to stop you getting lose in my absence."

"You could tie my hands behind my back." Though it grates at him, he's trying to seem accommodating. But he's starting to be more watchful now. He can't do this much longer. "C'mon, man, I'm starving here. If you're not gonna kill me..."

Sayid's eyes narrow. "And you aren't going to run off? Or hide in the shadows and smash my head in with a rock?"

He shrugs. "Where would I go?" And there is some truth to that. If he could leave no, he's no longer sure of the direction he'd come from, and it would be so easy to simply turn in circles, wandering across the sand until the sun and the crows took him.

Though, the rock idea has its appeal.

Sayid is silent for a time, and at last he seems to decide something. "All right." He moves forward across the floor, leaving the rifle behind, and for a moment Mike thinks he might actually have an opportunity until there's a faint flash in the soft light and he feels cold steel against his throat.

Sayid is untying his hands. "If you move before I tell you, I will cut your throat." And Mike believes him, and he stays still.  


* * * 

  
It's a strange sensation, walking along the edge of life and death this way. He's come close to death, closer than he's ever been, and before Iraq the only dead person he had ever seen was his mother, stilling and cooling on the kitchen floor of their apartment in New Jersey. He hadn't gone to his father's funeral. And even his mother, dying there on the floor of a heart attack that both of them should have seen coming, though she was still so young—that had not been a death in war. It had been ugly, but tame and bloodless. Pieces of her had not been scattered across the ground. He'd never seen her blood staining the dirt.

And now he's been close to death, within inches of it, seen it and smelled it and had it spattered across his clothes, and while he should be grieving for his team, while he should be practically crippled with hatred for the man bringing him dry bread and beef jerky... What he feels is alive, alive and almost detached from what's gone before, as though there never was a life before this cave and this man, as though there is no other truth but the water and the food and the ever-present shadow.

When he remembers his men, he feels a powerful sense of weariness, helplessness, and he tries to stop thinking about it altogether. And it's easier than it should be.

_Miyah._ The crack in the wall, the trickling of water, the coolness of it when Sayid allows him to raise his cupped hands to his face and drink. Miyah. Only the water and the darkness.  


* * * 

  
Sayid is bathing again, water glistening in his thick hair, and Mike is watching, and not trying to hide the fact that he's watching. There isn't much else to watch in here. And whatever else he's feeling in the region of his middle—or lower—it's just boredom. Boredom and instinct.

"Why don't you pray?"

Sayid looks up sharply. "Why do you assume that I would?"

Mike shrugs. "I dunno. I just... see people praying all the time. Since I got here. You start assuming pretty much everyone does it."

"How would I know the direction of Mecca from in here?" Sayid lowers his head again, damp hair hanging in strands around his face. "I don't pray."

"Why not?"

"I do not wish to discuss it."

Mike's mouth twists, dissatisfied and more than a little annoyed, but he lets it go. Maybe later, if he's careful about it, he can get more out of him. "I was raised Catholic," he says, smudging his boots in the loose earth on the stone floor. Most of the water has trickled away but some of it is coming towards him, a slow dark line moving over the ground. "Been a long time since I did any praying." Not even when the shooting started. Maybe he'd figured that they were all more or less on their own at that point.

Sayid turns towards him, skin still glistening, and Mike's gaze falls on the gentle curves of the muscles of his chest and arms. He wonders what would happen if Sayid were to notice the pointedness of the stare. Sayid is smiling, narrow and sardonic.

"So why do _you_ not pray?"

Mike doesn't answer immediately. Somehow it strikes him as an unfair question, though he knows it can't be. Here, he doesn't really think there are fair or unfair questions, as if the entire concept of fairness has been blown to pieces with his humvee, with his men.

"I don't know," he says finally, looking down at his bound hands. "I guess I don't really have anything to pray for."

"You could pray for your freedom."

He snorts a faint laugh. "Yeah, I could. And I could pray for a case of beer and a fuckin' air conditioner, and we'll see just how well that goes." He looks up at Sayid again, and he feels the meanness in his own gaze, like shards of glass behind his eyes, pointing outward, ready to fly. "Allah didn't seem too ready to save your boys, either."

Sayid hits him. He should have seen it coming and maybe on some level he did, maybe on some level it's exactly what he was going for, though why that would be is something he may never know completely. But Sayid hits him, and pain explodes across his jaw and as he tumbles sideways against the rock he tastes blood.

"I should kill you." He turns his head and looks up and Sayid is towering over him, a black shape backlit by the lantern. Mike spits blood and laughs harshly.

"So do it."

Sayid bends, dropping down into a crouch, and in an instant Mike fully expects to see the flash of the knife blade, to feel the coolness of it against his throat and then a sharper, more intimate coolness as it slices his throat open. But it doesn't happen, and after a few seconds his mind grows tired of being ready to die.

"What?"

"I have tortured people," Sayid murmurs, and there's something smooth and rich and liquid in his voice that makes Mike shiver for a variety of possible reasons, not all of them anything to do with fear. "For Saddam. It has been my job, to make them speak. And sometimes not to make them speak at all." He reaches out and grips Mike's jaw, and Mike shivers again and lets loose a quiet sound.

"I could make you wish for death. I could give you something to pray for."

_So do it already,_ but he just thinks it. It never makes it past his lips. He's not afraid. That's not the right word for it. He stares up and steady, though his cheeks are starting to ache a little where they're being jammed against his teeth, and that's not a challenge. That isn't the right word for it, either.

He just doesn't see any point in backing down. There doesn't seem to be anywhere else to go.

Sayid releases him and he drops back onto the stone, reaching up to massage his face before he remembers that his hands are tied at the wrists. He tries anyway, pressing against the inside of his cheeks with his tongue. There's dents in them, it feels like. They're bleeding in one place where he's bitten down on the flesh. He's annoyed. That's about the full extent of it.

Sayid is still there, staring down at him, moving his hands slowly over each other as though, now that they're no longer being used, he's not sure what to do with them.

"They would be alive if you had not killed them," he says slowly, and Mike tries to look more closely at him without making it obvious, because Sayid no longer sounds so sure. Of anything. "You know that's true."

"Okay," he says, turns away again and his eyes hit the crack in the wall from which all the water comes. _Miyah._ He wishes they could have a fire. The lantern light is cold and even turned low there's a glare to it that hurts his eyes. "Look, man, whatever." He glances up at Sayid, a flash of sullenness as he swallows his own blood. "Maybe you wouldn't be so goddamn cranky if you fucking ate something."

"I am fine." Sayid turns his back, hand moving briefly to the knife at his hip, and Mike sees it and Mike knows that Sayid meant him to. A little reminder for both of them, just what's at stake here. He doesn't doubt that Sayid would kill him, if that seemed like the best option. But he's pretty sure it doesn't, yet.

So he'll have to make a move before it is.  


* * * 

  
"So what were you guys doing here, anyway?"

It's some time later. He's not sure how much. An hour. Maybe two. More boredom, more dozing, and he trusts that Sayid is also bored enough by now that, if Mike casts out a line, he might bite and hang on. Dark eyes glittering at him from across the small cavern, and then an answer.

"We were watching for American convoys." He half shrugs, half smiles. What Mike is noticing most about Sayid at this point is his reluctance to commit. "Why were you there?"

"We were patrolling," Mike says simply. "We coulda been anywhere." He grimaces. "So bad fucking luck, then."

"As you say." Sayid looks away from him again, and maybe it's hunger or boredom or shock or plain old garden variety frustration, but Mike leaps without looking, feeling his mouth open and knowing what he's going to say before he says it, and inwardly responding only with a shrug.

"Why don't you just let me go?"

Sayid laughs shortly. "And why would I do that?" His mouth shrinks back into that half smile again. "I can see that maybe it's a good idea from your point of view. But your point of view is not mine."

"You got nothing to hang onto me for." Mike is sitting up a little straighter, trying to inject some conviction into his voice. "You're not trading me for anything. If they find us and you try using me as some kinda shield, you know there's a great chance we'll both end up dead. And right now we're just sitting in this fucking cave." If his hands weren't tied, he'd be spreading them beseechingly. "Just untie me and let me go. My men are dead. I just wanna get home alive. You go your way, I go mine, and we don't ever have to see each other again."

"Or I could kill you." It's delivered in such a casual, offhand kind of way, and Mike wouldn't ever be so foolish as to think it's a joke. "I think maybe that would solve a lot of problems. Maybe more than letting you go. For me."

"Okay," Mike says slowly, feeling a tightening in his chest of mingled confusion and annoyance. "Okay. So... why haven't you done that yet? Why didn't you do that a fucking day ago?"

And Sayid says nothing. Still that smile. But maybe now a sliver of uncertainty in it, like a crack making its way down a pane of glass. Widening and widening. Or maybe it's just the movement of the shadows over his face.  


* * * 

  
He doesn't know if it's day or night, but in some deep, reptilian quarter of his brain, it feels like night. It feels like night because he's working carefully in the shadows, trying to work in secret. He's found a loose piece of stone, long and sharp at one end, and carefully, trying so hard to be silent, he's rubbing the binding of his wrists against the edge. Enough to weaken it. Not enough to break it completely.

What he's hoping is that one sharp tug will take care of that. One sharp, extremely well-timed tug.

Sayid is sleeping, leaning back against the wall with a hand on his rifle, the lines of his face showing up stark and moving in the lantern light, so that the muscles themselves appear to be moving and it almost seems that he's awake, expressive, watching Mike with curiosity, worry, disapproval, anger.

Mike shivers and keeps moving his wrists.

Try to sneak out. No. Get him close somehow and try to overpower him. Maybe. Get the gun. Maybe. He should have tried this before, but he hadn't, and the reason he hadn't might be close kin to the reason that Sayid hasn't tried to kill him yet.

Whatever that reason is.

Looser, looser, finally he feels the stretch and strain in the bonds closing in on a breaking point and he stops, reaches down and carefully begins to loosen the knots binding his ankles. This, he could have also have tried at any time.

The truth, he supposes, is that he doesn't have to be here at all. And yet he is. Something happened out there in the desert. A world exploded, except maybe it wasn't just one world. His fingers slip and fumble at the knots and he imagines the world entire, the world of everyone, laid to waste in that single explosion, the RPG that took out everything. He could go back to his base and find it deserted but for the bodies, the walls cratered and collapsed, the tents nothing more than ripped sheets of canvas flapping in the wind. And soon the sand will cover all of it.

A few days ago—whatever time he's been here—that wouldn't have been a comforting idea.

"What are you doing?"

He looks up sharply, hands freezing in their action. _Shit. Shit._ He swallows hard, moves his hand to the wound in his thigh, which is still painful but hasn't shown any signs of worsening. "My leg," he says, and he's sure that Sayid knows exactly what he's been doing. He's never been a good liar. "It's hurting. Like... a lot worse."

Sayid shrugs. "Too bad."

"You said it could get septic," Mike pursues, though a tiny sensible part of himself is hissing _shutupshutupshutup._ "You said... fuck, man, I don't wanna die out here. Not like that."

"You wouldn't," Sayid says dryly. "I would put a bullet in your head before that happened." But he's getting to his feet, still with the hand on the rifle, and Mike allows himself to hope. And then he shoves the hope aside. All it is at the moment is a distraction. "I will take a look."

_He can't be falling for it,_ Mike thinks hectically. _It's the oldest fucking trick in the book. He can't be actually falling for it._ But he does seem to be. He's bending, crouching, reaching down with his free hand and pulling the ragged leg of Mike's fatigues away from the wound, and that's when Mike tugs sharp at the point where his wrists are joined and they part with a breaking sensation, and one of his fists strikes Sayid across the jaw. Snapping his head to the side. Lucky, but he doesn't have time to dwell or self-congratulate, he has to get the gun, and he's fumbling for it even as Sayid is fumbling to keep hold of it, cursing at him in Arabic and everything a blur of hands and struggling. He manages to land another punch but it's clumsy and off-center and he's too close to put any kind of force behind it, and at almost the same moment his head reels back from impact and the cut in his mouth opens up again.

He spits blood. He spits it directly onto Sayid's cheek.

"You--" Sayid snarls, and somehow the gun gets lost as they roll across the stone, the air full of curses and grunts and the scuffling of their limbs, and behind it all, the constant trickling of the water. It's strange that Mike can hear it over everything else, somehow both softer and more distinct, more _real,_ and when he finally gets Sayid pinned to the ground he looks up and sees the bucket right there, and the crack, and the cool wet darkness beyond.

Sayid snarls something else in Arabic. Mike looks down at him. He's lovely, and Mike's always known that in a distant, detached kind of way; the tangle of his hair, the gentle lines of his face and the deep liquid pools of his eyes, the curves of his arms and chest and the angles of his back. Mike has seen beautiful men before. He's slept with a few of them, when he was lucky. Sayid is beautiful and Sayid killed his men, his friends, his brothers, and what he should do now is kill Sayid, take his knife and slit his throat and let his blood drain down into the well, into the water, joining that eternal, maddening trickle.

What he does is kiss him.

The sound Sayid makes is something like a snarl, an arch of his body, a surge of fighting, but then it seems to change and melt into something else. A quieter sound. A hand against the back of his neck. He tastes blood, and he's not sure whose it is. Sweat and he's not sure whose it is.

It's crazy. It's the insanity of near-death, of losing his men, and possibly days in the darkness of a cave. He's lost his mind, and that's why he's slipping his tongue into Sayid's mouth, and that's why he's rolling his hips down and letting out a quiet sound, and that's why he's already hard.

The rest of it, though—the answering sounds Sayid is making, the pressure of the hands on him, and the hard flesh he's grinding into—that's all something he doesn't have any kind of explanation for.

"Miyah," Sayid whispers against his mouth, and they both laugh. Insanity.

"Na'am." They're both sitting up now, still tangled, bruised; there's a thin line of blood running down the corner of Sayid's jaw and Mike leans in and licks at it, copper and salt. He has no idea where the gun is. He turns, grasps the bucket and lowers it into the well, and as he lowers it Sayid is pushing up his shirt, running warm, dry hands over his spine. The bucket comes up brimming, coolness wafting off it like smoke, and he empties it over the two of them and they clutch at each other and gasp. Water. Miyah. An abundance of water. When he kisses Sayid again, water flows between their mouths.

It doesn't take much else. The stone is rough under their backs and their knees but their clothes come off somehow, and there's more water, wet grit sticking to their skin and grinding between their teeth. Mike tips his head back and moans at the sharp little pressure of Sayid's teeth at his throat, a hand working between his legs. Sayid's bathed. He hasn't. But he's bathing now, drenched and slick and arching up under it. "Khoz baalak," he whispers. _Be careful._ But Sayid is being careful, expertly so, and as his hips twitch upwards and he hooks an arm around a strong neck he's sure that it was only a matter of time before it came to this.

_You've done this before,_ he's going to say, in English or in Arabic he's not even sure, not even sure he'd know how, but before he can try to get the words out Sayid is silencing him with his mouth, stroking him with a hand that feels impossibly soft, though he knows it can't be.

Insanity.

In the end it's Sayid who takes him. There's a short scuffle for it, a kind of half-assed wrestle, and Sayid comes out on top and really, he doesn't see much reason to argue. He's been with other men who were pretty set on it going this way, and Mike... Mike can be flexible. But 'other men' is as alien an idea right now as the existence of the rest of the world itself. He slides over onto his hands and knees, and there's nothing but water and spit and he hisses with sudden discomfort when Sayid pushes a slick finger into him. But he can get past it, and he does. He drops his head between his shoulders and moans as he's stretched, again with the experience, again with the sensation of being someone else's deja vu.

He hadn't known it could be like this here. He hadn't known it was ever an _option._

He cries out when Sayid pushes into him. It hurts, and something in him agrees that it should hurt. He's breaking every rule he's been holding onto for the past few years. He's not using protection. He's fucking in theater, rather than in one of his safe zones back home where no one will know him. And he's being fucked by the man who's killed his men, and he wants it. He wants it. He reaches back and hooks an arm around Sayid's neck and shoves his way past the pain, letting himself unspool into new territory, new terrain. A vast desert, high wind. He tastes the grit in his mouth and ancient water. Folded into darkness, a cave at the beginning of the world. _Alhamdulillah._ He might be saying it. It doesn't feel like blasphemy, and that's another rule broken and denied.

Really, fuck the rules.

He can't kiss him; the angle is wrong. He tries, lips smudging against Sayid's throat, stubble prickling at him and sweat stinging the cuts in his lips. He tries, and he groans thickly when Sayid's hand curls around his dick, but his head is full of the sand and the wind and the moon and the fire burning, the humvee. Death. Maybe he came too close to it. So maybe none of the rules apply to him anymore.

He thinks he probably comes, but later he doesn't remember it. What he remembers is the water.  


* * * 

  
"You can go."

Later, and as always he's not sure how much later, but they're lying on a mat made of their tangled clothing, and they're tangled too. But he can feel whatever's been here fading. Sayid's arm curled around him but slowly pulling away, and there's shame there. He's not surprised. It's familiar. So that's also the same, across an ocean.

He tucks his head further under Sayid's chin, pursuing though he knows it's pointless. "What if I don't want to?"

"Don't be stupid. You cannot stay here."

He knows it. At some point, the rules have to apply again. He shifts their legs together and the wound in his thigh twinges, and it isn't entirely unpleasant.

"I--" he starts to say, and then he stops. He's not even sure where that was going. _I'm sorry. I don't understand this. I didn't want this. I want you. I want to kill you. I want to stay here. I want the war to end. I want it to continue forever._

Damp fingertips on his lips, not that they're needed. He wasn't going to speak. There's nothing to say. Outside of this cave, the rules are all in place again. The second they leave it they'll be enemies. And what's happened in here will never be something he can explain. Except that for a few hours, time became a different shape and all the rules flowed away over them like water.

War never had to make sense before. There's no particular reason why it should start now.  


* * * 

  
They don't intend to leave the cave at dawn, but that's when they do, and it seems fitting. They move in silence, feet quiet over the sand and no speaking. The second they step out into the open air Mike feels a strange kind of truce sliding into place, decidedly uneasy, and he feels that to speak would make everything too immediate, too real, and it will leave them with too few options.

He wants them both to walk away from this.

A few yards away from the cave, closer to the low buildings, Sayid motions him to stillness and vanishes into the shadows of a doorway. When he returns he's carrying a canteen and a radio, and he presses them wordlessly into Mike's hands, and Mike takes them without comment or thanks. He's walking out of here with his life. He's going to go home. There's a faint bite mark at the juncture of his neck and shoulder. By the time he makes it back to his base it will have faded.

Some way away from the buildings and the cave they turn away from each other. They've been walking together and there is no parting of the ways agreed upon; it just happens, just as everything else has only happened. There's no plan to any of it, though it isn't quite random. They turn and walk away from each other, and the sun is already high and hot. He can suddenly orient himself again, as though he's walked out of a kind of Bermuda Triangle in the sand; he remembers all of this when they drove by it before the attack. A mile away is the carcass of the humvee, or it is if no one has hauled it away. Mike flips on the radio and it crackles at him.

This is a betrayal. He knows it. It's a betrayal of the highest order. For a few hours, he turned his back on everything he's sworn, everything he thought he believed in, and if he dreams tonight of the accusing eyes of his men, it won't feel like any more than he deserves.

But it also doesn't feel like the betrayal it is.

The radio crackles again as he finds the right frequency, and he opens his mouth to speak a word and slam all the old rules back into place.

But _miyah, habibi._ Life is water. It flows through you and is gone.


End file.
